Quote:
Originally Posted by cannonfodder
A VERY BIG YES, with the above open even the highest clocked single core would struggle a little, The X2 wont have any if little impact on any games just yet, but with more than one program open the X2 will handle it
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"VERY BIG"? I had more than that open while playing GW with my older Athlon64 3000+ Newcastle (yes, single-core and Socket 754 single channel) and it never missed a beat because I had 1.5GB RAM. Guys, having things OPEN is going to cause RAM issues. Have things open that are actively using CPU cycles will potentially cause CPU issues. Given the applications you listed (and the fact that they will most likely be static while GW has the focus) I would say that you should be more concerned about having plenty of RAM to prevent excessive pagefile swapping (which makes your system run VERY slow) than having 2 CPU cores. But what do I know? I'm just an experienced and educated professional computer engineer. Why listen to me?
Look, do what you want. If you want to spend the $200 on a second core go ahead. I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but it comes down to this: if you're not sure whether or not you need a dual-core CPU
YOU PROBABLY DON'T!!! For the typical user it won't be necessary to have an SMP-enabled machine anytime soon. Heavy multi-taskers (not just having multiple things open, but multiple things open that are cranking on something) will benefit, and people who do a lot of engineering and media (video -- audio is nothing) encoding will benefit. Most gamers will not. Then again, if you just want to make sure you're future-proof and it's worth the extra $200 to do so, then why not? It's your $200.
The thing is, for the price of the X2 you could get an FX-series CPU that would actually run your games faster...